He just aims those crushed-glass eyes at me, not unlike the very pool we’re in now, such light ripples of blue.
Mother’s voice lifts, “You have?”
Oliver throws a dark look my way. “Serena says if you’re going, she’ll come.”
The grin that splits my face is dazzling.
It’s not that Serena will come to Rugby Sunday, but that she’s been ignoring my brother—and now has agreed to come, just to see me.
Ha.
Fuck you, Oliver.
“My heart breaks for that girl,” Amelia says.
I hate that they call us girls and boys, like we’re not in our twenties, less than a year away from being sold into marriage and birthing.Girlswhen it suits them,womenwhen it also suits them.
Mother tuts. I suspect she lost her hand.
“To lose her mother so young,” Amelia goes on, and there’s sincerity in the softness of her voice, a distant grief from the loss of her once-friend.
Serena’s mother was close, once, with Amelia and my mother. Three wasn’t a crowd with them. They rose through Bluestone together, then stuck together through aristos marriage.
Mother was the Mildred of the group, in that she was gentry among aristos.
I wonder, fleetingly, how she would have treated me if I wasn’t her daughter, just a deadblood elite aristos at school.
The pang in my chest turns me off the thought, fast.
Oliver fists his hand around his phone, then starts to push up from the chair. “I’ll see you at dinner,” he announces to everyone in general before he leaves.
Mother checks her watch at his departure. “Olivia,” she calls out. “Dinner in two hours.”
She is giving me an opening to leave if I want it.
Before I can think on it, my attention is shifted, lured by Dray.
He’s closer to my hip now, like he’s scooted his folded arms that bit nearer, and if he turned his hand, his fingers would graze over my flesh.
I take an opportunity to whack my hand aside, to shoo him off the edge of my lounger.
It does nothing, of course.
He just leans closer, reaches over me, his chin—his face—much too close to the swell of my hip.
He reaches for the fruit bowl.
But before he draws back, I feel it. A little pinch on my thigh, like he twisted his other hand to just snag me a little.
A sharp wince cuts me, and I lean my weight away from him. He just drops his gaze—to the curve of my backside.
An ugly flush burns me before I roll off the lounger and fall into the water. I swim to the steps and abandon the pool with the shark in it.
Wrapped in a cotton robe, my feet stuck into hotel slippers, my hair damp and scraggly, I shuffle through the Prince Suite to the small lobby.
Just two hours until we meet for dinner. Now I’ll spend a chunk of that time preparing my hair, and I loathe to waste time like that. I’ll need to wash out the saltwater, then condition it, then have it dried and styled.
Lucky I had the nap before joining the others at the pool, because there is no time for one before dinner now that my hair has been contaminated.